Art, then, is the revelation of the ideal in human life.  As the ideal is active and organic so must art itself be.  The ideal is never achieved, therefore the process of revealing it is creative in the truest sense of the word.  More than that, only by virtue of the artist in him can man appreciate or imagine the ideal at all.  To discern it is essentially the work of divination or intuition.  The artist divines the end at which human life is aiming; he makes men who are his characters completely expressive of themselves, which no actual man ever has been.  If he works on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of himself.  That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.  He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which are so various that the attempt to express them through the persona of himself would inevitably end in confusion.  That is why the great poetic genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.

Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to the absolute ideal.  In subordinating its particular intuitions to the absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign autonomy.  True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not the imposition of an alien.  To use our previous metaphor, as art is the consciousness of life, criticism is the consciousness of art.  The essential activity of true criticism is the harmonious control of art by art.  This is at the root of a confusion in the thought of Mr. Eliot, who, in his just anxiety to assert the full autonomy of art, pronounces that the true critic of poetry is the poet and has to smuggle the anomalous Aristotle in on the hardly convincing ground that ’he wrote well about everything,’ and has, moreover, to elevate Dryden to a purple which he is quite unfitted to wear.  No, what distinguishes the true critic of poetry is a truly aesthetic philosophy.  In the present state of society it is extremely probable that only the poet or the artist will possess this, for art and poetry were never more profoundly divorced from the ordinary life of society than they are at the present day.  But the poet who would be a critic has to make his aesthetic philosophy conscious to himself; to him as a poet it may be unconscious.  This necessary change from unconsciousness to consciousness is by no means easy, and we should do well to insist upon its difficulty, for quite as much nonsense is talked about poetry by poets and by artists about art as by the profane about either.  Moreover, it is important to remember that in proportion as society approaches